


Hath Thee In Thrall

by onstraysod



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: F/M, Otherworld creepiness, Slight Non-Con (though that is debatable), possibility of sympathetic feelings towards Lascelles (also debatable)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-08-17 04:50:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8131085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: She is his fideal, his succubus, his leanan sídhe. She is the Lady of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart, and Henry Lascelles is her Champion.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vicivefallen](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=vicivefallen).



> This story is dedicated to vicivefallen, as a humble gift of apology for taking so ridiculously long to finish _The Seduction of Maria Bullworth_. It was also just a lot of fun to write. ;) I hope you like it.
> 
> Title taken from _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_ by John Keats.

It has become a myth to him. A rumor of something unreal but palpable to some part of his mind, like a fragment of a dream half-remembered. He believes he felt it once, warm on his upturned face, many lifetimes before this damp twilight, these purple-grey skies barely to be glimpsed between the latticework branches of pale, skeletal trees. Before the coldness that soaked from the air into his bones, borrowing deep to weigh him down upon leaden feet that have no power to carry him from this abyss. But though he can almost remember the sensation of it -- that blindingly bright orb above the world -- he can no longer name it. 

Henry Lascelles can not recall the word for sunlight.

It doesn’t matter. There are so many words he has no need for now. Sixteen only, really. The sixteen he has reason to use, though his own reason does not enter into the matter: his mouth, like his body, moves without decision. _I am the Champion of the Lady of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart_. The words fall from his lips whenever a figure appears on horseback between the gateposts that guard the road, and though he comprehends the meaning of these words he does not mean to say, he fails to understand their import there in that shadowed clearing amidst the forbidding trees. For long stretches of time - and that is another word that no longer holds any meaning - his conscious self exists muted and bound, deep within the automaton that paces the crumbling cobblestones, raises the hand that holds the pistol, harangues intruders with a mouth he can’t control. Powerless, it half sleeps, dormant as his body moves in that eternal twilight, around and around the courtyard beneath the dark-stoned tower, its one lit window hovering like a watchful eye over his head.

Yet at other times his cognizance stirs into full possession of his senses and he remembers - with a sudden pain that slices through his brain and beating heart and paralyzes his muscles in a rigor of trauma -- the life he had lived before, in a different world where he had walked and spoken words of his own volition, and controlled other people through malice and threatened cruelties, and been uncontrolled himself. And the horror of these moments of clarity unmans him, turns him into another person he does not know and cannot respect: a tall, slender, coldly handsome man on his hands and knees in a courtyard paved by broken stones, their fragments upturned by thorny tendrils sprouting barbed, poisonous-smelling flowers. The man’s fine clothes are frayed at cuffs and edges, his body is wracked with the violence of his tears, his throat is torn with hoarse screams.

 _Help me_. Two other words he remembers and uses, though to no avail. He is alone there, save for the dim cold gleam in the window, and whatever tends that candle either does not hear him, or does not care.

Even in his loneliness, his desperation, Lascelles does not wish -- in those fleeting moments when he is lucid enough to wish for anything -- to see the inhabitant of the dismal tower. He does not, in the extremity of the horror in which he finds himself marooned, want to see the kind of creature that festoons the trees of their demesne with slowly rotting corpses, that fences its domain with statues of leering, open-mawed grotesqueries. But it is inevitable, in this mist-cloaked perdition, that one evening -- or is it dawn? Is it high noon? There is no way of telling, for all hours look the same, never fully light nor fully dark -- the bolted door of heavy oak at the base of the tower creaks slowly open. And across the courtyard Lascelles, in one of his lucid moments, chokes on his tears and silences himself and -- dread curdling his blood -- turns to face the creature he unwillingly defends, to look for the first time upon his captor.

She moves softly, noiselessly, gliding in a pool of her own light that is frigid to the eyes, to the skin. It is an aura of frost that glosses her over, making her subtly indistinct like a thin wash of highlighting color atop a detailed painting, or fog laying across the surface of the land. Or is it the eyes of her observer that perform this trick and nothing of her own design: eyes trying in vain to focus upon something that exists simultaneously in more than one dimension, a brain unable to process the sight of something so strange and close to the divine? 

She is tall, though not abnormally so; long-limbed and lithe, pale skin contrasting with the curtain of black hair that flows past her shoulders, the deep cobalt-blueness of her eyes. Her lips are pomegranate-red, sinful and vicious, as she beams down upon him, and the perfect symmetry of her delicate features, her unparalleled beauty, steals the breath from his lungs even as he looks upon her and loathes her and longs to tear her to pieces with his hands.

“My Champion,” she murmurs, and her voice echoes oddly in his ears, reverberates upon the air of the courtyard like ripples in water, a discordant hum beneath the words suggesting her true, inhuman voice. “My treasure.”

She kneels, her gown -- white and indistinct from the gleam that surrounds her -- pools out from her body, flowing cold against his hands, and she caresses his cheek. A shock, a thrill like electricity, pulses through him, sharp-edged like the tingle of falling snow, the brush of ice against bare flesh. He is held, mute and unmoving, by the focus of her gaze, and his nostrils are filled with the intoxicating incense of her scent: dizzying, rousing visions of lush meadows brimming with summer wildflowers, of ripe fruit falling open wet and plump with seeds in his hands. Of starlight and moonlight and unnamed pleasures in the dark, it reminds him. She raises her other hand, holding his face, stroking his ginger hair through her long pale fingers.

“I am the Lady of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart,” she says, “and you are my defender. My protector. My brave and stalwart Champion. Only the most beautiful of mortals may serve me. And you, my sunlight, my star -- you are so very beautiful indeed.”

He pries open his cracked lips with an effort, moves his lead-like tongue. “My lady” he croaks, and one hand fists at her skirt: the material passes like water through his fingers. “Please. I beg you. Please have mercy. Please let me go.”

Her expression is pitying, sorrowful. She gathers him up in her arms somehow: long, graceful, soft perfumed arms that hold him like iron bands, and she cradles him against her body like a child. “Hush, my peerless one,” she whispers into his hair, pressing his face to her breast and rocking him gently. Her touch, the fall of her breath, send tendrils of heat across his skin. “Hush. You know not what you say. Of mortals you are most blessed! For you have come out of a cruel, benighted world to abide with me in a better realm. Forever.”

He remembers that word, remembers its meaning. And so the tears come fresh, the only manifestation he has power to make of the despair that overwhelms him. Yet he doesn’t resist her, doesn’t fight, as she lifts his head again and kisses him, merciless lips like sweet poison on his tongue. His sees innumerable stars, galaxies unfurling in infinity as she caresses him, and when she spreads her kisses to his cheeks and brow and the crown of his head, his face is lost in the perfumed night of her hair.

It is then that a too familiar ache intrudes upon his misery, a sensation recalled from his long-ago life. She pushes him back upon the cold stones and she is naked suddenly, her gown falling away like shreds of mist, and Lascelles gazes mesmerized at the most exquisite body his eyes have ever beheld, perfection in every curve: in the shape of her shoulders, the smooth plane of her stomach, the roundness of the breasts that peek out from beneath the rivers of black hair. She spreads her pale thighs over his hips and unfastens the placket of his breeches, and he stares down at his own stiff manhood as if it is a part of him he thought lost in that distant other world. But all thought leaves him as she lowers herself upon him, engulfing him deep in her mystery, her strange storm of warmth and coldness. Ecstasy like nothing he has ever experienced pulses through Lascelles as his eyes drink in the cruel beauty of her flawless body and strong square jaw and pitiless lips, and she rocks upon him, moaning softly with pleasure. Bracing herself with one hand upon his chest, she smiles down at him, her eyes locking with his and turning as black as bog water.

“Champion,” she says to him as she gyrates, and her lips do not move: her voice comes to him from within his head, slicing into the haze of his mind. “I have perceived your thoughts. I have sifted through your memories. I have plumbed the depravity of your deepest desires! What misery to quicken my sluggish life spirit, what cruelty to warm my winter flesh! Did you imagine I would lure just any man here? Always you have longed to be more than an average man, a creature out of the ordinary way, and behold! So you are and so you shall be, for you belong now to the Lady of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart. Champion and vassal, lover and seneschal. Because of you, I shall be protected. Because of you, I shall endure.”

Rocking sharply forward, putting both hands upon him, she tears his shirt asunder and lays both hands on his slender chest, on his fragile skin. She smiles with those red lips, with pearl-white teeth, as she presses her fingers into him, as she scratches and shreds and rends him with her nails. The breath is choked from him in a long moan, for there is pain and yet she is moving upon him, harder and faster, rising and falling, bouncing and rocking, wild and thrashing like a whirlwind of black hair and cold light, gripping his manhood so tightly he comes not once, but endlessly it seems, again and again and again. And as he comes he sees her ghost-pale skin begin to take on a warmer hue, a golden gleam beneath the porcelain, the features of her face grow somewhat softer, like springtime, like the earth coming out of its hibernation renewed. And she throws back her head and speaks in some inhuman tongue that is not even language, not even speech unless it be the speech that wild birds use to converse together, and she is one hypnotic curve of stomach and breasts and impossibly long throat, and Lascelles wants nothing more than to reach forward with his leaden limbs and touch her, trace that unspeakable perfection with his fingers, pass his thirsting mouth over every inch of this woman who is not a woman, is more than woman, this goddess or demon in woman’s form. He wants this even as he wants to escape her, even as his pleasure ebbs and he feels again the cold stones beneath him and the utter emptiness of a body that has been drained and used.

Smiling still, she lifts herself off of him and kisses up his bare chest until she reaches his mouth. “Champion,” she purrs again, that strange echoing voice coming in successive waves and varying octaves to his ears, and she nuzzles her face against his as he pants, struggling to recover his breath or the least power in his limbs to move. The perfume of her is stronger now, the cascade of her hair more silken, her lips yet softer as she presses them to his, tracing the line of his mouth with the tip of a wet, honeyed tongue. Looking down at him -- not as a lover looks at their beloved, he realizes, but like a cat regards the mouse between its paws -- her blue eyes sparkle with an almost blinding sharpness as she says: “Who could feed and renew me but a mortal worthy of me? With your every act you shaped yourself for me; of malice and craft and poison you are made. And now you are mine. Forever.”

She is clad again in her threads of mist and light and frost, and she is gone: back to the tower with its ancient moss-carpeted walls, the high casement with its single quivering light. Emptied to the bone, Henry Lascelles lays in the courtyard unmoving, staring up at the skeletal trees holding faint, distant stars between their bare fingers. There is no comfort in the sight: it is a cold, impassive light, reminding him too much of eternity. Time without end -- and if it had no end, had it also had no beginning? Or was that other life -- a life of ease and comfort, of fine things and clever schemes and pretty women in warmly lit rooms and sweets upon his tongue -- had that been before the beginning of time? So far away does it seem.

 _I will be the sweetness now upon your tongue_ , she tells him in his mind the next time she comes to him. For this is the pattern of his existence, a pattern unmeasured by time, for time does not exist in that twilight clearing in the woods. His consciousness dims and slumbers, and he paces, pistol in hand: _I am the Champion of the Lady of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart_ ; and then his lucidity returns, the corpses swing in the wind, and he weeps.

And then she comes to him and he loathes her for his gaoler, his succubus, and yet-- She lets the veil of her black hair fall around him, brushes aside the diaphanous layers of her gown, and he is filled with an unendurable desire. With every climax he is a little less and a little less, and yet he remains. The stars hang motionless over the tower, a mockery of their warmer cousins that moved in cycles over a lively city on a river, in some strange world he once knew.


End file.
